Mageia Blog (English) : Weekly Roundup and News – weeks 24 &amp; 25

For the longest time our wiki main page has been very plain and simple; our own Zalappy has designed a new look, and the modifications are almost ready! Keep watching, because it’s looking really good! Thanks to Zalappy for his artistic flair, and to apb for his hard work making it happen.

What else is happening?

Around 700 packages landed in Cauldron – it’s certainly bubbling! Our appreciative thanks go to our tireless devs and QA folk, without whom we wouldn’t have a grand distro like Mageia. We had lots of updates over the last two weeks – here’s the list:

A Word about Trolls

Mageia has a persistent troll targeting people associated with Mageia.

Currently going by the name Andrew, a troll hiding behind tor anonymizing servers has been targeting Mageia for some time.

The From: address will typically look like
‘From: “Andrew (Mageia Community Leadership Committee)”<BM-2cTUvERX7xLR1c1Pb5its4T4b1SSaFcPCj@bitmessage.ch>’
although they change the From: address at times – a technique known as nymshifting.

There is no Mageia Community Leadership Committee. The troll has also claimed to be the Mageia Council Leader, and various other titles.

Due to their creating many identities and spamming various Mageia mailing lists, all email addresses using anonymizing services we are aware of have been blocked from use when signing up at identity.mageia.org, and have been blocked from sending messages to the mailing lists.

They have also sent some email messages with the from address forged to make it look like it was coming from someone who is on the Mageia Council.

There are no Mageia conferences planned, let alone ones with fully paid trips for council or board members.

They have contacted various people trying to convince Mageia to hide bitcoin mining software they’d provide in every browser we package, with the money going to them, and a small percentage for us, of course. The suggestion is abhorrent to the Mageia community and would never be allowed. All package changes committed by Mageia packagers are publicly available for viewing.

We can’t prevent them from sending messages like this to anyone whose email address they have found.

All we can do is remind people that the internet has trolls. From: addresses in email message can be set to whatever the sender wants. Whether this troll is just a psychopath who enjoys getting an emotional response from people, or is someone trying to help destroy the usefulness of anonymizing services by getting more people to block them is open to speculation.

With any messages on the internet, people have to trust but verify the messages are from the person who normally uses that name. If the message looks strange, compare the sending IP address of that message to the sending IP address from normal messages from the user. While many ISPs do try to stop their users from sending messages with from addresses that are not for that ISP, most don’t, and for those that do there are always ways around their blocks.

Either add the various anonymizing email servers to your spam filters, or just ignore messages from trolls. Responding to them in any way just encourages more abusive messages.

Many thanks to the Mageians who have been working to inform people and shut this troll down.